


Across That Line

by BlueRoboKitty



Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Language, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Mild Depiction of Violence, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-05
Updated: 2015-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-13 04:25:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4507674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueRoboKitty/pseuds/BlueRoboKitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Only he understands what she did that night. Takes place after New 52 Batgirl #19 but before #34.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Across That Line

He knows something is very wrong.  

Jason whips his motorcycle onto her street, its loud engine deafening compared to the silence. This part of the city is quiet today, almost surreal. The rain gently patters against the asphalt, as if trying to tenderly wash away with the grime that clung to the old buildings and hearts of those who live here. Gotham really knows how to drag him back here every time he tries to stay away for good. The city is an entity in her own right, possessing a force that always manages to stop him whenever he makes up his mind to set his safe house on fire and be done with the place forever.

It’s that very force behind the urgent text message he received barely fifteen minutes ago, asking him to come over. Three little words and those are words she would never send, not without dire enough conditions.

Something is very, very wrong. The nervousness he feels is not the exciting kind, it’s not a flutter of anticipation in the pit of his stomach like it would be under other circumstances. Instead, a stone of unease sits there, slowly crushing his insides with its foreboding weight. He slows to park by the sidewalk, and there is a heaviness in his movement as he switches off the engine and kicks the stand in place, tension as he swings his leg around to dismount. He removes his helmet, a plain blue thing, nothing fancy. No sense in alerting the citizens that Red Hood is in the neighborhood.

He can’t ignore his instinct. 

Jason swallows a hard lump that formed in his throat on the way here and knocks on her door and bounces on the balls of his feet. It’s wet out here and he'd give anything for a cigarette to chase away the chill. He stuffs his hands deep his pockets and scrunches up his shoulders and he really hates the rain. He calculates how long it will take for him to grab his pistol from his shoulder bag. Just in case… well, just in case.

Then comes the sound of a lock turning. _Several_ locks. This is not a good sign.

The door opens and his heart sinks.

She doesn’t look good. It’s as if all the weariness of the Batgirl cowl, all its responsibilities and sacrifices, now showed plainly on her little freckled face. Her eyes are heavily bagged and as red as her tangled hair. Her pretty green gaze that he finds himself thinking about more often than not lately is glassy and almost inhuman.  

“What happened?” is the first thing he says. He doesn’t give a damn if it sounds nosy or intrusive or that he’s demanding answers right here in the middle of the street. He’s already thinking of the thousand gleefully painful, bloody things he’s going to do to the person that made her into this.

Barbara shakes her head and grabs his sleeve to pull him inside. He can smell the alcohol on her breath as he passes by her. She only drinks socially. She sighs deeply as she closes the door and presses her back against it. Now that he’s here, she doesn’t have to worry about the locks. “I don’t even know where to start,” she mutters to the floor.

“You can start by telling me his name,” Jason retorts darkly, crossing his arms over his chest. “I can track him from that.” And that bastard will die before the night is over. He has a couple of swords that can use some sharpening.

Barbara snaps her head up to glare at him, the first sign of life he’s seen in her since she opened the door. “Nobody did this, Jason,” she says, pushing her hair back from her face. “I…” She bites her lower lip and the hand in her hair starts scratching nervously at the back of her neck. She sways a little on her feet. “I did something.”

Her words are soft, pleading, imploring him to simply listen. They don’t calm him down, but they make him put a lid on his rage for now.

He follows her into the living room where the TV plays some afternoon drama on low volume. It’s surprisingly clean. At first, he doesn't notice any traces of any alcoholic beverages in the room, no empty beer cans or glass bottles strewn about the place as signs of her drunken distress. Ah, but there is a box of cheap wine sitting on the coffee table. Poor girl. Her hangover is going to be _hell_ in the morning.

“Sooooo… what did you do?”

Jason has no idea where to go from here as he shrugs off his bag and sets it by the door. He’s never been good at this sort of thing. He’s used to Roy talking his ear off about his problems, trivial or otherwise. He’s used to Kori addressing an issue with absolutely no needling from him. Here… Babs wants to talk. She sits on the couch with her hands clasped between her knees and it’s obvious she can’t find the right words to use. And he has no idea how to prompt her without sounding like an impatient jerk. He leans against the couch’s arm and waits for her to figure out what she wants to say.

“It’s my brother.”

He should have figured that bastard was involved somehow.

Her voice trembles. “He’s dead.”

 _Well, no great loss there._ He doesn’t say it out loud, of course. Scum or not, he is – _was_ – her little brother. “Sorry.” He manages to mean it, too.

It’s as if his response is the crack that ultimately breaks the dam. Barbara bursts into tears, heaving, gasping, choking sobs, the kind of heart wrenching sadness that seeps through the stitches of a broken soul. It catches him off guard and he stands there completely helpless. Should he hold her? Tell her everything will be okay? Come off like he’s belittling her feelings while taking advantage of her in the process? He’s certain that any move he makes next will be the wrong one.

“Jason,” she chokes, as if it takes every ounce of her strength to speak. “I can’t… _I can’t be Batgirl anymore!”_

At first he’s not sure why they had suddenly gone from her dead brother to not being able to – oh. _OH._

Not too long ago, Jason would be proud of her. Maybe a part of him actually is right now. One less scum of the earth to have to deal with, and even better that the sick fuck won’t be tormenting her or her family anymore. But… he was still her _brother._ Jason has killed many people, but he can never say any of his victims were particularly close to him. He broke a few of Grayson’s ribs once and while that was immensely satisfying at the time, the idea of actually taking the guy’s life has never really crossed his mind… not beyond a fleeting, amusing thought anyway. And truth be told he felt kind of bad after. Kind of. 

He does the only thing he can do. He sits down next to her, gently placing his arm over her shoulders. She curls into him, small and helpless, and for a long while she sobs into his chest, soaking the front of his shirt. She is so drastically different from her steadfast drive, her stubborn resilience. He doesn’t think he has ever seen her like this, not even back when he was trying to fill his Robin shoes and she was the toughest cutie that strutted her way into his life with a tenacity that made him jealous, made him work to be a better Robin.

Still feeling like a useless dud, his hand hovers a hesitant moment before placing a few awkward, somewhat hard pats on her hair. She continues to cry like she hasn't noticed and eventually his patting flows into gentle strokes, his fingers running tenderly through her strands, careful to not pull at the knots. Her sobs quiet down to shaking whimpers and he sighs softly because what he's doing seems to be working. 

“When I was little, I used to get nightmares a lot,” Barbara whispers into his shirt when she finally has control of her emotions again. “Part of the cop’s daughter package deal. My dad used to come into my room and sit by me. He would pet my hair, tell me that everything was going to be okay. That he will always come back to me and my brother no matter what happened on the job. So I had nothing to worry about. And finally I stopped having bad dreams about him not coming home.”

Her fingers dig into the fabric and he feels the sharp edges of her nails against his skin.

“He… he…” She swallows hard. “…he wants to arrest Batgirl.”

“He knows she did it?”

“He saw everything. Also my batarang is kind of lodged in my brother’s eye.”

She makes a hollow sound from somewhere in that dark, wretched point between a laugh and a sob.

Jason closes his eyes briefly. He should have been there. Fuck everything, he should have been there. He would have gladly killed that psychotic fuck for her, put a nice little bullet with his name on it between those mad eyes and blast his brains into oblivion. Barbara would hate him forever, but she wouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of losing her conviction _._ If he were there, he would carry the burden for her. 

She sits up, moving from under his arm. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “How do you do it?”

The question is surprising. It shouldn’t be. It’s one newbie killer talking to an experienced killer. In any other situation with literally _any_ other person in this world, Jason would be amused. Laugh even. Instead, he feels a little sick.

“How do I do what?” he asks stupidly.

She takes his hand, keeping focus on it so she doesn’t have to look him in the eye. Her fingers trace the lines and callouses as if committing each detail to memory. Despite this whole situation and the circumstances of him being here in the first place, he shivers.

“How do you… deal?” She looks up at him then. Her green eyes are sharp and intense as if she’s trying to peer into his soul. “How do you sleep at night?”

Ha. That’s a good one because he _doesn’t_ sleep at night; it’s more like passing out from sheer exhaustion and then eventually waking up again, lather, rinse, repeat, and that is only during a  _good_ week when he's too tired to be bothered by his nightmares. But he doesn’t say so. “I dunno,” Jason replies, glancing away. “I just kinda keep telling myself that those bastards got what they deserved. Crime lords, weapons smugglers, slave traders, you get the idea.”

“I see.”

That doesn’t help and he knows it doesn’t help because he knows she can’t look at her own brother as a mere psychopath who was long past due being put down like a sick dog like the rest of the world can. She can never see him that way because she believes in a world where no one is past redemption, that there isn’t a single person alive who isn’t beyond saving. If not for that very belief, Jason would not be sitting here right now with her.

He takes a deep breath.

“I meditate,” he says, feeling the slightest blush on his cheeks because he is going in all the way with this whole advice thing, and he’s already certain he’s going to fuck up somewhere and make things worse. “Meditating keeps me grounded. Keeps me from losing myself in my own thoughts because I have a lot of crazy ones sometimes, not gonna lie. And there was this thing I learned... while I was, um, away and it basically goes like ‘ _accept the darkness, embrace the light’_. It’s a mantra of sorts. It pretty much means, you accept the darkness within you, that it’s there and it’s not going to go away, but because of it you are able to better see the good that you actually do. Something like that.“

"So me killing my brother was a good thing?" 

 _Shit_. He looks away and runs his hand through his dark hair. "Listen, Babs, I didn't mean..." 

"No, it's okay. I get it." Then she asks, “Were you a Buddhist monk or something?” Her tone is both facetious and genuinely curious.  

“Kiiiiind ooooofff…” Jason trails off. He doesn’t want to explain everything to her, they will be here all week. “They definitely weren't Buddhists, though. They kicked me out.”

“Why does that not surprise me?”

They both laugh then, strained, tired, but warm all the same. A strand of hair falls over her face again and this time he is the one who tucks it tenderly behind her ear. His heart skips a beat when her face lights up with the softest of little smiles.

“Did anything I say help at all?” He may as well be honest. “I really suck at this sort of thing.”

“It does,” she replies with a nod. “The meditation thing you mentioned makes a bit of sense. I’ll try it. My roommate is into that sort of thing, so next time she goes to her yoga class, I think I’ll go with her.”

“Better than drinking wine from a box. You seemed to have sobered up at least.”

She snorts and it’s the cutest sound. “Because I just cried out all the alcohol a few minutes ago.”

“Heh. Does this mean you're feeling better?”

Her smile fades and she looks down at her hands, lacing and unlacing her fingers. “Not really but I feel more confident I can get past this. Somehow. Or at least get used to the feeling that I’ll never forgive myself.”

That is a feeling he knows intimately. It’s the kind of feeling that comes to dinner uninvited every night and there’s nothing you can do but put up with its presence.

“Jason…”

But the feeling he gets whenever she says his name is something he will never get used to. It will always flow past his defenses like a gentle light. It’s also uninvited. But not unwanted.

She looks at him and he looks back at her and he has this really crazy thought, shocking and wild, of kissing her. Maybe finally address that one million pound elephant in the room that has been sitting with them since he walked in the door. He finds himself leaning forward slightly. And then he stops himself.

Not like this.

“I guess that means my work here is done,” he quips instead. “I should probably head back.” He makes no effort to get off the couch.

“Um… you know,” Barbara says in a gentle voice as if she is suddenly shy. Which is kind of nonsensical because he has never known her to be shy. “A new episode of that dragon show is about to come on. I remember you mentioning that you like it, too. Do you want to watch it with me? If you don’t mind staying a little longer, that is.” She leaves the rest of it unsaid, but he knows what she really means. She doesn’t want to be alone. He is intimately aware of that feeling, too.

Neither of them seem to realize it but their foreheads are touching, resting gently against the other.

 “Sure. I’ll stay as long as you need me to.”

However long it takes.


End file.
